Monthly Archives: July 2018

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Well, tomorrow at this time we will be pulling into Mystic for our first stop on the way to the island. And so it is fitting to use this last blog post before the show to catch you up on the investigation into that carving on the spinning wheel at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

THIS JUST IN…

Remember this painting…

The Spinning Loft

And do you remember the detail shot of the carving on this large wheel in the foreground

Well, Follansbee and Co have uncovered some information that brings us closer to solving the riddle of who might have carved it and what building would it have been.

PAULA

Marcoux

I’m a food historian who consults with museums, film producers, publishers, and individuals.

My training is in archaeology and cooking, and I enjoy applying the knowledge of past cooks and artisans to today’s food experience.

My work is exploring bygone pathways of food history and culture, through building, experimenting, playing, and eating.

I’ve known of her through Peter, and following her on social media, but we haven’t yet met.

So Peter reaches out to his Plymouth pals and they do what they do best…research stuff. I’m going to copy the thread of their discoveries here, with permission of the author, and then the caveat that she made me promise to include will be there at the end. Clearly these people are driven by brilliant minds, and their super powers are curiosity.

From Peter then Paula,

PF -So the question is:Is the graffiti scratched into this equipment at Mystic, originally from Cordage park, real? Is that a building somewhere around Cordage?

Who would know?

PM -I will want to read her blog later carefully—but yes what mystic exhibits is one third of Plymouth Cordage’s rope walk.

PM -The builidng in the graffiti (which IS fascinating) looks to be a wharfside structure, right? The ell to the right is on pilings over the water. Plymouth Cordage was situated to take advantage of Plymouth’s best natural channel—a piece of relatively navigable water called the Town Guzzle. Certainly long gone by the time of this image around 1900:\https://digital.hagley.org/AVD_1982_231_016

If you look at this map, you can see how the walk was situated….(here’s a clip) I would guess that the building pictured would be between the place it was carved in the ropewalk building and the harbor.

Then…PM – Also January 25, 1867 — the storehouse at the Cordage Works was “blown down” in a gale and a lot of damage was done to wharves…. that could have been the end of that building (WT Davis, Memories, p 221)

And again a day later…

PM – In its earliest iteration the Cordage consisted of a rope-walk, wharf, storehouse and other buildings (incorporated August 1824).

Huge expansions came by the late 30s, with the adoption of steam power, but the walk itself might function the same regardless of power source.

I can see from the same source that two Carrs (Andrew and Patrick) had been working for the Cordage for decades by 1900 —then both around middleaged and having started working there young — Patrick at 9).

My money that a little more research will suggest their father, Belfast emigrant William Thomas Carr, produced these graffiti after lunch on August 4th, 1851, while his foreman was out sick with “a summer complaint, brought on by eating blackberries and cream”. Okay, we probably won’t get to that satisfying a level of detail. But the first two paragraphs are documented at least.

And quickly after I asked if I could share this here…

PM –

Sure, Heather, with the proviso that it is very “tossed-off” and incomplete—I should be working on my own problems, but I get so sucked into these kinds of questions (in case that’s not apparent) but I’m always surprised when others are interested. And although I was joking about the elder Mr. Carr from Belfast, I would not be shocked if I could get a little further with his identity—the Cordage was great at record-keeping. In it’s first fifty years at least it was the very model of a paternalistic enterprise — its founder had very high ideals and took a distinct interest in the welfare of the workers and their families.

Here’s the bibliography so far. (There are lots more cordage publications, too, that I haven’t looked into yet.):

The Plymouth Cordage Company; Proceedings at Its Seventy-fifth Anniversary

By Plymouth Cordage Company (1900)

Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian

By William Thomas Davis

History of the Town of Plymouth

By James Thacher

Now wasn’t that cool to learn about ?

I know, me too, I love the library at our fingertips time we live in.

And I love that all these people are making their livings today by dabbling in centuries old traditions and crafts.

If you want to learn more about such endeavors, I encourage you to start by doing some of you own research, and I’ll make it really easy for you…

We here in the studio are sorting and packing and tweaking and altering as we get ready to roll northward for the Granary Gallery Show Opening on Sunday.

Humble appreciations for your patience as the website is being updated, our tech guru uses the word migrated which just sounds lovely. He has been our hero this week, rock solid and unflappable, as there are always some bumps in the road to progress and he is still answering my emails, even as the early bird catches her worms. ( I’m playing with the “migration” thing there…says the bleary eyed artiste…) Blessings upon you Ross.

Another HUGE, absolutely HUGE shout out of gratitude to pals Matt and Paul for not only offering, but actually showing up within minutes of my request for help. They came toting kayaks, as I had interrupted a float on the nearby lake, and swiftly and oh so carefully loaded the paintings into the trailer for us.

That is always a tricky part of this process, as the work of an entire year gets packed in a tiny aluminum box that needs to transport them safely over land and sea for their big reveal. It was shear bliss, in the hot and humid afternoon, to have two strong young men take on the hardest bits of that job. Their kindness and grace has cemented our friendship.

I’ve been instructed to scroll throughout the website and look for problems. Talk about asking for trouble. There are some glitches which we are addressing, again about the patience, but some unexpected feelings are popping up as well.

When sorting through 18 years of paintings, you are also reviewing the last 18 years of your life. Wasn’t expecting that, so I find myself swirling in emotional detours. Mostly pleasant, often happy, but with some pop-up grieving and twinges of longing mixed in.

Among many of the “missing” links we are scrambling to fix, I found a few golden oldies that tie in with some of this year’s paintings…

Lighthouse Wake – which shows the channel between Chappy and the Lighthouse.

In this year’s painting, Anchored in Autumn, I tweaked that a bit and moved the lighthouse just a few hundred yards to the left so I could get it in the composition. On the actual panel it was inches.

Then there was the year of the birds… And one of my personal favorites,

The Gutting –

This is a working dockside view of the Edgartown Yacht Club. The Vose Boathouse sits out of this frame but off to the right.

And this…

Onward –

Where we are looking directly at it sitting there all happy to be in the water on a bright sunny day.

To be completely honest, there were many paintings upon my wild reviewing this morning that I had totally forgotten I had ever painted.

I’m sure it’s the stresses over the last few days… as I am equally certain it is the slippage of my aging gears.

But it is interesting to take some measure along the journey from there to here of my life behind the brushes.

Stay frosty out there my friends, our little family is all the better for you being in the world.

Step out with me onto this majestic wooden porch and into the glorious autumn air on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

What stretches out before you is Edgartown Harbor on a morning when only the stalwart working fisherman are plowing the waters sending out gently lapping waves in their wake.

I’ve been trying to find a way in to paint this harbor’s horizon line for years. When Anne Vose invited me to this boathouse last October, and I stepped out onto this porch I had found it.

In order to get the widest view of this historic waterfront, the perspective is a huge component in the composition. Long expanse of two and three story buildings means a wide panel with a thin line of tiny houses and a whole lot of sea and sky.

So to have the boathouse act as a frame and the boats in harbor to help provide a swing of direction for the eye it was possible for me to tell a richer story. One that connects the generations of an island family with the vibrant history and culture of an active island town.

I’ve given you an idea of some of the cobblestones on the road that lead me here.

Now I want to let you zoom in and see some of the brushstrokes that occupied the 80 days and 80 nights I spent at the easel to complete the journey…

After climbing down those long steep steps from the bluff and peeking around inside the room below we have climbed up again to the top floor of the boathouse.

Last fall I was invited by Anne Vose to join her on the porch and take an artistic measure of the historic structure.

While she and Pat sat in rockers outside solving all the problems of the world I explored the world of wonders within.

I talked, in The Changing Room painters notes, about the way the water reflects the sunlight back up into the room and bounces off the differing surfaces.

Up here, another level above the ocean, the angles are longer and sharper so they jut straight up into the corners of the veridian stained rafters and then ease down to those luscious wooden walls to nestle softly on the antique weavings of carpet and chintz.

And that light engages with every one of the deep rich colors inhabiting this chamber.

Those stairs rippling through the old glass in the back window are echoed in the black and white photo framed alongside. The robin’s egg blue that was once the only color on the glider’s frame repeats on the inside window frames then fades into a pale sage green on the mouldings’ exteriors.

The deep red of the oriental carpet is straight out of my Barok Red tube of Old Holland Paint, and the hunter green might as well have a fox running out ahead.

And then there are the faces… the teasing visages of the man carved in the table and the pastel of the flirtatious flapper.

Like the shiny dots of sunlight around the edges of the porcelain there was a glisten in the corner of her eye when Anne recounted the day the pilings were being repaired and one whole side of the boathouse collapsed into the harbor.

Not only can you trace the depth of the family’s roots through the objects in this room but you can understand the core feelings of love for this vintage island treasure in the emotional telling of that tale…

to a boathouse in a harbor in what they call the shoulder season, those weeks between the chaos of summer with traffic and tourists and hot muggy sunburns, and the first frosts of the winter to come.

You arrive at the top of a very high bluff with a vast harbor spread out before you. Then you climb down and down and down two very long flights of white washed steps then across the wooden planked dock …

To he Vose Boathouse an historic architectural wonder built directly in the Edgartown Harbor. The family received a letter of approval from the war department in 1899 (it hangs on the wall today) for it to be built there and nothing says Vintage Vineyard like this space.

We will begin our painterly tour with a peak into that first door you come to just through the dock gate on the bottom floor into what I have called the changing room

The lovingly maintained wooden doors, with their inlayed repairs for repurposed hardware, line two walls with small locker rooms that each have windows framing expansive views of the harbor and out across to the tiny island of Chappaquiddick.

The light bounces softly across the water and lays like a butterfly on the kid glove surfaces of that weathered wood then sparkles off of the lacquered canoes and the worn ochre of an oar.

But my favorite part is that there are spaces in between each floorboard through which you can see the iridescent sea beneath.

As the sun slants in the October morning light the colors below are breathtaking.

From the classic canoe to the sweeping parsons bench there is something solidly New England here.

It was so quiet when I was working there that the only sounds were the gulls cawing overhead and the gentle lapping of the wakes as the working fisherman motored their way out past the boathouse out to sea.

I can picture it now… in a family filled summer with the noises of children wriggling into swimsuits and parents toting wicker baskets which the grandparents have stuffed with picnics and rainhats…

and through the years and all of that chaos and glee I can feel the boathouse enfolding them all like a great big cedar wrapped hug.

ow that first warm sunny day when you understand that winter has at least one more round in her but damnation you are going to clean out a garden bed…any bed.

On just such a day last March we both huddled in our warmest fleece, Herself putting her boots up in the sky chair and myself blowing the cobwebs off of my weeding bench, we passed a lovely hour or two warming old bones in the afternoon sun.

I was hoeing away happily when I saw something odd.

Just under the drying stalks of last year’s hyssop was a layer of what looked like fur.

I often throw the leavings of Finn’s coat after her weekly brushings out into the garden or on top of the nearest snowbank during the coldest months

So that was my first guess.

Then the fur moved.

Ok yes, I screamed.

Woke Herself up actually… and then she screamed.

Not ten minutes before while I had been weeding the adjoining bed I had said to Pat… Now I’m going to be really careful because this is where those bunnies were nesting last year.

So…the synapses fired up… and collided.

Approaching cautiously and much calmer now I moved aside the covering layer of dry grasses and peeked under the grey and white blanket of fur…

and sure enough tiny baby bunnies nestled in a hollow the size of a teacup.

Oh the tenders and gawd… I had been hacking away had I nicked one before the discovery ?

I tried my best to restore order to the nest but I had removed almost all of the weedy canopy that had made this new spot seem promising.

So, I added some leaves to the top and found a wide wicker basket and laid it over the nest and offered up a prayer to mother nature for their souls

For the next two mornings I stood over the nest and looked for signs of life. Both times I saw the slightest rise and fall of the leaves and the next day Kory came.

He’s helping me with the yard work and as far as I can tell…so far he has no fears. Ok a slight shimmy in his step when he happens upon a large spider… but otherwise he’s a rock solid go to guy for wild animal taming.

Kory lifted the basket and the leaves and the fur and sure enough there were three living breathing bunnies curled up in their teacup.

As anyone who knows me well will tell you they all got names.

Seeing as they were born in my herb bed I dubbed them, Hyssop and Thyme and Vincent. The last just in the case I had, accidentally mind you, nicked one with the ancient Japanese weeding tool.

A few days later they were gone.

A week after that two of them jumped out of the way of the string trimmer I was just about to swing along the stone edging of the hydrangea bed.

Then, every afternoon for a month, all three showed up at my new bird feeders, which I have moved right outside of my easel window.

One of them kept lingering later and later into the dusk after siblings and squirrels finches and doves had long since gotten into their jammies and been tucked into their beds.

On this night as I was waiting for him the sunset sent extra long low rays through the bottom of the fence and shooting across the tops of the grass.

And like that the bunny hopped into that shaft of light and stood completely still for hours keeping me company as if he were on guard.

Then one of his ears twitched and caught the fading light and I saw the notch.

Now I am waiting for my sunflowers to grow tall enough to pose as the source of those angling rays in the big portrait I want to paint…

“…I believe that everyone has imagination, that no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby. And as children, we all lived in an imaginal world…you know, when you’d be told, “Don’t cross that wall, because there’s monsters over there,” my God, the world you would create on the other side of the wall. And when you’d ask questions like “Why is the sky blue?” or “Where does God live?” or all this kind of stuff…like one of the first times I was coming to America, I said to my little niece, who was seven, I said, “What will I bring you from America?” She said, “Uh…” and her father said, “No, ask him, or you won’t get anything.” And Katy turned to me and said, “What’s in it?” – (laughs) – which I thought was a great question about America.”

An excerpt from the On Being conversation between Krista Tippet and the Irish Poet John O’Donohue

Our little carrot whisperer would have asked that same question at 7. Now she is 8 and when we see her soon I will ask her but mostly I like to listen.

Zoe is one of the most richly vibrant souls it has been my pleasure to share the planet with.

Her curiosity is fueled by a Tigger-like enthusiasm.

Stealthy observation informs her empathy.

And story telling is her super power.

So, last summer, when I asked her seven year old self to pose with the freshly picked carrot and she examined it for a long while deciding it made her think of the snowman Olaf’s nose…

I waited

Then she thought the long green fronds looked like hair and she curled them in an arc over her head…

and I waited

And she started a story about how that made her feel like a queen and she was going to take the carrot to visit her castle…

and I waited

until the queen decided she was in a carriage and the carrot would, therein, accompany her and she rested it regally on her shoulder closed her eyes and beckoned the footman to ride on.

An artist can’t choose her Muses.

We can only sharpen our brushes everyday in the hopes that when they are ready to appear we can catch them on … the whisper.

“When you look at some faces, you can see the turbulence of the infinite beginning to gather to the surface. This moment can open in a gaze from a stranger, or in a conversation with someone you know well. Suddenly, without their intending it or being conscious of it, their gaze lasts for only a second. In that slightest interim, something more than the person looks out.”John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

My pal Alex, the philosopher fisherman, is a muse of the most mysterious kind.

He arrives unannounced, on silent feet, and rings the bell hanging ourtside my studio door…once. One clear ring. And never when I am listening for it, so it’s always a gift.

He is never empty handed. Most often a fishing pole is leaned against the porch, with a bit of tackle, or a turtle or a golf ball or the bottom shard of an old bottle… and then we talk.

Picking up right where we left off, even if it was a year ago, the conversation flits about according to where his curious eyes land or where my wandering mind does.

It can bounce around all day, or sit solidly on something heavy for a while. All topics are worthy of our examination and his curiosity is contagious.

One day during the summer he was 14 he came bearing a turtle. “I thought you would like to paint this” I wasn’t entirely sure, but brought my camera out, rather than the turtle in, and he held it in the sunshine for me to see.

It was a beautiful creature with patterns and colors that we studied under the tutelage of his vast knowledge of local nature. He and his subject were reverential of each other and I was just there to record.

It was a while before I saw him again, and in the interim I sorted through those photos to see if anything connected with the brushes.

What snapped my heartstrings was his face. The presence and the peace that was a young boy just beginning to tip into adolescence.

I made some notes and put it aside.

The next time I saw Alex, was a hot summer afternoon. He had been fishing after a morning of chores and was shirtless and sunburned with the creek dripping off of his sneaks.

The muses struck… What wasn’t working from that first photo shoot was that he had been wearing very dark eyeglasses. I asked him to pose again as now I could clearly see all of his face.

So we found a turtle sized rock and tried to recreate the scene.

And then another year went by.

I found myself reviewing the two sets of photos, knowing it was time to work on this painting. But what I had before me was a dramatic contrast.

Alex holding the turtle was clearly a young boy. Alex holding the turtle stone was absolutely a young man.

I really labored over this one. In the end I decided to do both, eventually the turtle will surface.

But I had been reading the poetry of John O’Donohue, the brilliant poet from Ireland, and came across his writings On Beauty. Just slayed me.

And centered me squarely on this gentle face. The landscape of this young man written across that brow brimming with confidence pale cheeked innocence fading into those widening sunwashed shoulders.

Here is my handsome Muse only last week taming another wild creature on my studio porch.

Anna Kuerner and her husband Karl immigrated from their home in Germany to Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania.

Together with their growing family, they farmed a hillside which now is filled with buttercups in the spring.

I stood amongst those buttery yellow harbingers on a warm afternoon in May studying the wide stuccoed front porch of their 19th century farmhouse and noticed a break in the solid rectangular lines of the main house.

Around back when you first step into the kitchen this doorway is to your left.

Through it you can see a passageway from the kitchen and then the window and on into the room.

Karl built this woodshed attached to the house so that Anna, who insisted on cooking with a wood fired oven, would not have to go out in inclement weather to fetch her fuel.

On this stormy creek flooding weather heavy day…

I’d say there’s a special kind of love in that gesture.

PS- Pat requested a second blog post today. It’s been a tad stressful here and she says that these posts make her happy. So, here ya go Babe. Love, me.